For a Scholarship with CommitmentAuthor(s): Pierre BourdieuSource: Profession, (2000), pp. 40-45Published by: Modern Language AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25595701Accessed: 07/10/2010 17:24

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For a Scholarship with Commitment

PIERRE BOURDIEU

The question that I would like to raise is this: Can intellectuals, and espe

cially scholars, intervene in the political sphere? Must intellectuals partake in

political debates as such, and if so, under what conditions can they interject themselves efficiently? What role can researchers play in the various social

movements, at the national level and especially at the international level?

that is, at the level where the fate of individuals and societies is increasingly

being decided today? Can intellectuals contribute to inventing a new man

ner of doing politics fit for the novel dilemmas and threats of our age? First of all, to avoid misunderstandings, one must state clearly that re

searchers, artists, or writers who intervene in the political world do not

thereby become politicians; according to a model created by Emile Zola on

the occasion of the Dreyfus Affair, they become intellectuels or "public in

tellectuals," that is, people who invest in a political struggle their specific

authority and the values associated with the exercise of their craft, such as

the values of disinterestedness and truth?in other words, people who

enter the terrain of politics but without forsaking their duties and compe tencies as researchers. (This is to say, in passing, that the canonical opposi tion that is made, especially in the Anglo-American tradition, between

scholarship and commitment could be devoid of foundation: the intrusions

of artists, writers, and scientists?Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, or Andrei

Sakharov?in the public sphere find their basis and rationale in a scientific

The author is Professor of Sociology at the College de France. A version of this paper was pre sented at the 1999 MLA convention in Chicago.

Profession 2000 40

PIERRE BOURDIEU III 41

community defined by its commitment to objectivity, to probity, and by a

presumed independence from worldly interests. It is as much to this pre sumed respect of the unwritten moral code of their trade as to their techni

cal competency that scholars owe their social authority.)

By investing their artistic or scientific competency in civic debates, scholars incur the risk of disappointing or, better yet, of shocking others.

On the one hand, they will shock those, in their own universe, the acad

emy, who choose the virtuous way out by remaining enclosed in the ivory tower and who see in commitment a violation of the famous axiological

neutrality?wrongly equated with scientific objectivity when it is in fact a

scientifically unimpeachable form of escapism. And, on the other hand,

they will shock those, in the political and journalistic fields, who see schol ars as a threat to their monopoly over public speech and, more generally, all those who are disturbed by the intervention of scholars in political life.

Scholars will risk, in a word, awakening all forms of anti-intellectualism

that were hitherto dormant among the powers that be, bankers, industrial

ists, and high civil servants; among journalists; among politicians (espe

cially left-wing politicians), all of whom are now holders of cultural capital; and, even, among intellectuals themselves.

But to indict anti-intellectualism, which is almost always underpinned by ressentiment, does not exempt intellectuals from the criticism of intellectual ism: this critique to which all intellectuals can and must submit themselves. Critical reflexivity, in other words, is the absolute prerequisite of any politi cal action by intellectuals. Intellectuals must engage in a permanent critique of all the abuses of power or authority that are committed in the name of intellectual authority; or, if you prefer, they must submit themselves to the relentless critique of the use of intellectual authority as a political weapon

within the intellectual field and elsewhere. All scholars must also submit themselves to the critique of the scholastic bias (as analyzed in my book Pascalian Meditations), a bias whose most pervasive form, which concerns us

directly here, is the propensity to a kind of paper revolutionism devoid of

genuine target or effect. I believe that the generous but unrealistic impulse that led many European intellectuals of my generation to submit to the dic tates of the Communist Party still inspires too often nowadays what I call

campus radicalism, this typically academic propensity to confuse the things of logic for the logic of things, according to the pitiless formula of Marx, or, closer to our current predicament, to mistake revolutions in the order of

words, or texts, for revolutions in the order of things, to mistake verbal

sparring at academic conferences for interventions in the affairs of the city. Having posed these preliminary, apparendy negative, reflections, I can

assert that intellectuals (by which I mean those artists, writers, and scientists

42 II FOR A SCHOLARSHIP WITH COMMITMENT

who engage in political action on the strength of their artistic or scientific

competency) are indispensable to social struggles, especially nowadays

given the quite novel forms that domination assumes. A number of recent

historical works have displayed the pivotal role played by think tanks in the

production and imposition of the neoliberal ideology that rules the world

today. To the productions of these reactionary think tanks, which support and broadcast the views of experts appointed by the powerful, we must op

pose the productions of critical networks that bring together "specific intellectuals" (in Foucault's sense of the term) into a veritable collective intel

lectual capable of defining by itself the topics and ends of its reflection and

action?in short, an autonomous collective intellectual.

This collective intellectual can and must, in the first place, fulfill neg ative functions: it must work to produce and disseminate instruments of

defense against symbolic domination, which increasingly relies on the au

thority of science (real or imitated). Buttressed by the specific competency and authority of the collective thus formed, the collective intellectual can

submit dominant discourse to a merciless logical critique aimed not only at

the lexicon of the discourse {globalization, flexibility, employ ability, etc.) but

also at its mode of reasoning and in particular at its use of metaphors (e.g., the anthropomorphization of the market). The collective intellectual can

in addition subject this discourse to a sociological critique, which extends

discursive critique, by uncovering the sociological determinants that bear

on the producers of dominant discourse (starting with journalists, espe

cially economic journalists) and on their products. Lastly, it can counter

the pseudoscientific authority of authorized experts (and chief among them of economic experts and advisers) with a genuinely scientific critique of the hidden assumptions and often faulty reasoning that underpin their

pronouncements.

But the collective intellectual can also fulfill a positive function by contri

buting to the collective work of political invention. The collapse of Soviet

style regimes and the weakening of communist parties in most European and Latin American nations has liberated critical thought. But meanwhile

the neoliberal doxa has filled the vacuum, and social critique has withdrawn

into the "small world" of academe, where it marvels at itself and engages in internecine campus wars that threaten no one on any front. The whole

edifice of critical thought is thus in need of reconstruction. This work of

reconstruction cannot be done, as some have thought in the past, by a sin

gle great intellectual, a master thinker endowed only with the resources of

his singular thought, or by the authorized spokesperson for a group or an

institution presumed to speak in the name of those without voice, union,

party, and so on. This is where the collective intellectual can play its irre

PIERRE BOURDIEU ||| 43

placeable role, by helping to create the social conditions for the collective

production of realist Utopias. It can organize or orchestrate joint research on

new forms of political action, on new ways of mobilizing and making mo

bilized people work together, on new ways of elaborating projects and

bringing them to fruition. It can play the role of a midwife by assisting the

dynamics of working groups in their efforts to express, and thereby dis

cover, what they are and what they could or should be, and by helping

thereby to realize the reappropriation and accumulation of the immense

social stock of knowledge with which the social world is pregnant. It could

thus help the victims of neoliberal policies discover the differential effects

of one and the same cause (commodification) in apparently radically di verse events and experiences?especially diverse for those who undergo them?associated with the different social universes, in education, medi

cine, social welfare, criminal justice, and so on, within one nation or across

nations. (This is what we tried to do in the book The Weight of the World, which brought to light new forms of social suffering caused by state re

trenchment, with the purpose of compelling politicians to address them.) This task is at once extremely urgent and extremely difficult, because

the representations of the social world that we need to fight, that must be

resisted and countered, are issued out of a veritable conservative revolution? as was said of the pre-Nazi movement in Weimar Germany. In order to

break with the tradition of the welfare state, the think tanks from which have emerged the political programs of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and, after them, of Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Gerhard Schroder, or Lionel Jospin, had to effect a veritable symbolic counterrevolution and to produce a paradoxical doxa. This doxa is conservative but presents itself as

progressive; it seeks the restoration of the past order in some of its most ar

chaic aspects (especially as regards economic relations), yet it passes off re

gressions, reversals, surrenders as forward-looking reforms or revolutions

leading to a whole new age of abundance and liberty (as with the language of the so-called new economy and the celebratory discourse around net

work firms and the Internet). All this can be clearly seen in the efforts to dismantle the welfare state,

that is, to destroy the most precious democratic conquests in the areas of labor legislation, health, social protection, and education. To fight such a

progressive-retrogressive policy is to risk appearing conservative even as one defends the most progressive achievements of the past. This situation is all the more paradoxical in that one is led to defend programs or institu tions that one truly wishes to be changed, such as public service and the national state, which no one could rightly want to preserve as is, or unions or even public schooling, which must be continually subjected to the most

44 II FOR A SCHOLARSHIP WITH COMMITMENT

merciless critique. (Thus it is that I am sometimes suspected today of being a turncoat or accused of contradicting myself when I defend a public edu

cation system that, as I have shown time and again, fulfills a function of

conservation and consecration of the social order.) It seems to me that scholars have a decisive role to play in the struggle

against the new neoliberal doxa and the formal (and false) cosmopolitanism of those obsessed with globalization or global competitiveness. This fake

universalism serves the interests of the dominant: in the absence of a world state and a world bank financed by taxation over the international circula

tion of speculative capital, it serves to condemn as a politically incorrect re

gression toward nationalism the recourse to the only force, the national

state, that is capable of protecting emergent countries such as South Korea or Malaysia from the stranglehold of multinational corporations. This fake

universalism allows one to stigmatize, under demonizing labels like Is

lamism or fundamentalism, the efforts of such and such a Third World

country to assert or restore its political autonomy, based on state power. To

this verbal universalism, which also wreaks havoc on the relations between

the sexes and which leaves citizens isolated and disarmed in the face of the

overwhelming power of transnational corporations, committed scholars can oppose a new internationalism, capable of tackling with truly interna

tional force such environmental issues as air pollution, the ozone layer, nonrenewable fuels, or atomic clouds?because these problems know no

boundaries between nations and social classes?or such economic issues as

the foreign debt of emergent countries or the question of the hegemony of

financial capital in the field of cultural production and diffusion (as with

the growing concentration of publishing or movie production and distribu

tion). All these issues can unite intellectuals who are resolutely universal, that is, who are intent on universalizing the conditions of access to the uni

versal, beyond the boundaries that separate nations, especially those of the

north and south.

To do so, writers, artists, and especially researchers?who, by trade, are

already more inclined and better prepared than those in any other occupa tion to cross national borders?must transcend the sacred boundary in

scribed in their mind, more or less deeply depending on their national

tradition, between scholarship and commitment, in order to break out of

the academic microcosm, to enter into sustained and vigorous exchange with the outside world (especially with unions, grassroots organizations, and issue-oriented activist groups) instead of being content with waging the "political" battles, at once intimate and ultimate, and always a bit un

real, of the scholastic universe. Today's researchers must invent an improb able combination: scholarship with commitment, that is, a collective

PIERRE BOURDIEU ||| 45

politics of intervention in the political field that follows, as much as possi ble, the rules that govern the scientific field (rules that those who were in

vited to speak at this session today have given admirable illustrations of, on

the foreign policy of the United States and on the Palestinian question). Given the mix of urgency and confusion that usually characterizes the

world of political action, this innovation is truly and fully possible only by and for an organization capable of coordinating the collective work of an

international network of researchers and artists. In this collective enter

prise, the scientists are no doubt the ones who have to shoulder the pri

mary role at a time when the powers that be ceaselessly invoke the

authority of science?the science of economics in particular. But writers

and especially artists also have their contribution to make. "True ideas bear no intrinsic force," said Spinoza, and the sociologist is not one to dispute him on this. But sociologists can suggest the unique and indispensable role

that writers and artists can play in the new division of political labor or, to

be more precise, in the new manner of doing politics that needs to be in

vented: to give symbolic force, by way of artistic form, to critical ideas and

analyses. They could, for instance, give a visible and sensible form to the

invisible but scientifically predictable consequences of political measures

inspired by neoliberal philosophy. I would like, in conclusion, to recall what happened in November 1999

in Seattle. I believe that, being careful not to overestimate that episode, we

can see in it a first and exemplary experiment that can be taken as a point of

departure in devising what might be a new form of international political action able to transform the achievements of research into efficient symbolic demonstrations?and devising what might be, more generally, the strategies of political struggle of a new nongovernmental organization defined by full commitment to internationalism and full adherence to scholarship.

NOTE =?

This address was translated from the French by Loi'c Wacquant.

WORKS CITED

Bourdieu, Pierre. Pascalian Meditations. Cambridge: Polity, 2000.

Bourdieu, Pierre, et al. The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999.